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How the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected the Accessibility and Quality of Health Services in Poland Cover

How the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected the Accessibility and Quality of Health Services in Poland

Open Access
|Dec 2021

Abstract

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on the global economy, including the provision of health services, with medical facilities and patients cancelling or postponing medical appointments. An alternative to in-person appointments was through the available forms of telemedicine. Scientific reports around the world have suggested that the accessibility and quality of health services declined. The aim of this study was to investigate the accessibility and quality of health services in Poland and to verify whether there were differences between men and women in this respect. The study was based on the authors’ own survey questionnaire filled in by 265 respondents, including 181 women, 82 men, and 2 persons without a defined gender. The study revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the accessibility and quality of health services declined. Additionally, women were more likely to use general and specialist health services than men, but a comparison of changes in the assessment of accessibility and quality of services by gender revealed no differences in the assessment of accessibility and quality.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/slgr-2021-0032 | Journal eISSN: 2199-6059 | Journal ISSN: 0860-150X
Language: English
Page range: 561 - 572
Published on: Dec 30, 2021
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 issues per year
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© 2021 Magdalena Tuczyńska, Maja Matthews-Kozanecka, Arkadiusz Nowak, Ewa Baum, published by University of Białystok
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.